All elections in the future will be held with voting machines with a paper trail, the Election Commission said on Friday after the opposition’s allegations that poll results in the recent elections were manipulated in favour of the ruling BJP.
While the EVMs with Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) will further ensure credibility of future elections, the Election Commission also threw a challenge to political parties to prove that the machines used in recent elections were manipulated or can be tampered with.
After a meeting with the national and state-level political parties, the Chief Election Commissioner Nasim Zaidi for the first time personally responded to charges by some opposition parties of tampering and manipulation of the EVMs. The CEC held his ground and asserted that the EVMs in the past were not tampered with while he assured that the system will be further secured in the future.
“Although use of VVPAT with EVMs will ensure total credibility and transparency and put to rest all controversy, the Commission will, after today’s meeting, hold a challenge,” Zaidi told reporters after the all-party meeting.
The CEC’s assertion was countered by Aam Aadmi Party convenor and Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal who tweeted, “Sad that the EC has backed out of the hackathon.”
However, the EC maintained that it will offer opportunity to political parties to demonstrate that EVM used in recent elections were tampered with or that EVMs can be tampered with even under strict technical and administrative safeguards as applicable during elections, Zaidi said.
He, however, did not give any date for the proposed challenge which he announced in his opening remarks at the meeting. Zaidi also said the Commission has “no favourites” and it was equidistant from all parties.
“You should be convinced that EC has no favourites...we maintain equidistance from all parties and groups. It is our constitutional and moral duty to stand dead centre of the circle drawn around us by 56 political parties (seven national and 49 state recognised parties),” he said.
The CEC’s remarks seemed to be a response to Kejriwal questioning the independence of two Election Commissioners AK Joti and OP Rawat in recent municipal elections in the Capital. He had claimed in an interview that the two ECs were close to the BJP governments in Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh respectively.
Following the allegations, Rawat had recused himself from the cases related to disqualification of AAP MLAs the Commission is hearing.
‘Hackathon refused’ In the closed-door meeting on Friday, a debate reportedly took place over the definition of ‘hacking’. The AAP, which has been leading the opposition charge on this issue, claimed that its proposal of holding a ‘hackathon’ has been “rejected” by the Commission.
Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who was among the AAP representatives in the meeting, tweeted that the EC “refused to carry out a hackathon“.
The EC will only throw a challenge asking the parties to prove that machines used in the past elections were tampered with, he claimed. However, there was no official word from the EC on Sisodia’s claims so far.
AAP MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj, who held a live demonstration in the Delhi Assembly about how EVMs can be hacked, told reporters on the sidelines of the meeting that EC shared nothing new so far towards alleviating the fears of the parties.“They won’t let us access their machines and then challenge us to prove our charge of hacking. The EC is being very smart,” Bhardwaj said.
Leaders of other parties like the CPI, RJD and RLD raised related as well as other aspects of the electoral process like corporate funding.
“The whole issue is about the ethos and integrity of the election process. Why are advanced countries in the west not using EVMs?” CPI national secretary Atul Anjan asked.
RJD spokesperson Manoj Jha said by harping on the infallibility of EVMs, the EC was acting as the custodian of just the “instruments” and not the process as a whole.